moat-kv-ha 0.5.3

Principle of Operation

Home Assistant talks via MQTT. MoaT-KV has a quite versatile MQTT adapter. Thus we can store Home Assistant’s entitiy configuration, plus their state, plus the commands Home Assisant issues to get things to change their state, in MoaT-KV.

MQTT can only transmit binary data. DistHASS thus creates a few codecs that support binary data (translating them to on/off), integers/floats, and JSON.

Thus, bottom to top:

• Mosquitto on port 51883

  • basic installation, does not need persistence or retained messages

  • Serf would work, but it imposes additional delays

• MoaT-KV, using Mosquitto as a backbone

  • a special user with conversion rules for JSON etc.

• DistMQTT

  • retained messages are stored in MoaT-KV

  • transparent channels to forward MQTT messages unmodified, if required

  • anything else is broadcast as a MoaT-KV message

  • uses port 1883

• Home Assistant, or anything else MQTTish for that matter

  • must use MQTT 3.11

If you have devices that only can use MQTT 3.1, you can teach them to talk directly to Mosquitto, via a transparent range.

Setup

• Run moat kv ha init -i

• Add a MoaT-KV user for Home Assistant and set its conv parameter to hassco:

  moat kv auth user param NAME conv hassco

• Start Moat-MQTT with something like this configuration:

  kv:
      server:
          host: '127.0.0.1'
          port: 27586
          auth: "password name=NAME password=PASSWORD"
      topic: [mqtt, msg]
      transparent:
      - [home,ass,event]
      - [home,ass,state]
      retain: [home, ass]
  listeners:
      default:
          max-connections: 500
          type: tcp
      local-tcp:
          bind: 127.0.0.1:1883
      remote-tcp:
          bind: 10.107.3.18:1883
  timeout-disconnect-delay: 2
  plugins: ['auth_anonymous']
  auth:
      allow-anonymous: true

  If you have devices that use MQTT directly, modify the transparent list to include your current MQTT prefixes.

• Modify Home Assistant’s MQTT integration to do autodiscovery. If you’ve set it up via the GUI, the file you need is .storage/core.config_entries. Find the entry with "domain": "mqtt" and modify its data entry to read:

  "data": {
      "broker": "127.0.0.1",
      "discovery": true,
      "discovery_prefix": "home/ass/dyn",
      "port": 1883,
  },

• Run moat kv ha conv.

  This teaches MoaT-KV to auto-convert the Home Assistant data so that everything in MoaT-KV sees binary states as booleans, temperatures are floats, the configuration’s JSON is a real data structure, and so on.

  Without this conversion, it’s all strings. We don’t want that.

• Restart Home Assistant.

• Run moat kv ha add light foo bar.

  A new light should show up in the Home Assistant GUI.

  You can try to turn it on, but it will go off by itself a second or two later because there’s no device yet.

• Run moat kv ha state light foo bar True.

  This command changes the state manually.

  In Home Assistant, the light’s indicator turns on.

• Adding an actual device that monitors the light’s MoaT-KV command entry / its [MoaT-KV-]MQTT command topic, actually affects the hardware, and changes the state, is your job.